Page 186 of The Last Remaining Light

"But I know who he is." Her voice trembled once, then steadied.

"He is the boy who carried books I could barely lift. He is the one who sat in a chair inside my room when I was ill, reading to me until I fell asleep. He is the one who crossed half the continent because he thought he was going to lose me."

Her eyes found Korvel, but he looked away.

"He has had every reason to become what people feared." Her eyes burned, tears blurring her vision. "But he never did. He still protects."

Elowynn reached backward and took Caelyn's hand fully in hers before she turned to look at his transformed visage.

"You are still you." The words hardly rose above a whisper, yet they felt louder than anything spoken in the chamber.

Caelyn stared at her, and she watched as something in his expression cracked.

Relief.

Raw and unmistakable.

For a moment, the chamber disappeared.

The Starless. The darkness below. The fear pressing in from every side. None of it seemed to exist. There was only Caelyn looking at her as though she had handed him something he had spent his entire life believing he would never have.

His hand lifted, and he brought it to her cheek. The backs of his black-veined fingers stroked along the skin beneath her eyes, wiping a tear away. Elowynn reached up and gently laid her palms along his grizzled cheeks. She pulled him down to her, eyes closing as they pressed their foreheads together, breathing as one.

The chamber shook as a vibration slammed through the floor with enough force to stagger them all.

Caelyn wrapped his arms instinctively around Elowynn, steadying them both as stone dust and small debris rained down from the ceiling.

Old stone groaned and shifted, and somewhere deep within the darkness below, a deafening crack echoed through the foundations.

Vaelor's face had drained of color. "No..."

The word escaped him, his eyes flying wide. The reaction alone terrified Elowynn as another pulse erupted from the distant structure.

It was brighter this time. Longer. The silver light illuminated more of the chamber than before, and that was when they all saw what stood at its center.

A ring. A colossal, circular structure surrounding a shaft descending beyond sight.

Ancient pylons encircled it, though most were broken. Several had even collapsed entirely. The remaining ones flickered with unstable resonance.

It looked like the heart of the containment system. They were looking at the very heart of the thing the observatories had been built to maintain.

Another crack echoed through the darkness and one of the distant pylons shattered. Silver light exploded outward and this time the Starless reacted.

Thousands began moving at once toward the ring. Toward the broken containment structure. Toward whatever waited beneath it.

The engineer stared in horror. "They're going to it!" Then he ran toward them, as if trying to stop them from entering the ring.

Perhaps panic finally overcame reason. Perhaps the sight of thousands of moving Starless shattered whatever courage remained within him. But whatever the cause, he broke away from the group and sprinted toward the center of them all.

The engineer barely managed three steps before the nearest Starless reached him.

His scream echoed before it was swallowed beneath a surge of pale, ruined bodies.

Lora had choked back a scream as she thrust her face into Alyra’s back, unable to watch as blood and entrails sprayed outward from the mound of Starless.

It was over almost as quickly as it began.

When the Starless continued onward, nothing remained visible except the blood and viscera on their bodies, and a flickering lantern lying broken upon the stone.